Birthday or not, Beethoven has come up quite often in Classically Speaking. So, in this episode we featured clips from previous conversations. In what turned out to be one of composer Christopher Rouse's last interviews before he died in 2019, Rouse connected the opening of his 5th symphony to Beethoven's 5th. That same short-short-short-long also started Mahler's 5th, a parallel drawn by Nashville Symphony conductor Giancarlo Guerrero. Pianists Yefim Bronfman, Stephen Hough, and Lara Downes also illuminate the influence that Beethoven has had on their work, and the canon of piano literature.